Social media marketing

Social Media Marketing
for Your Small Business
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Social Media Marketing for Your Small Business

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Intr oduction
As a small business owner you are already well aware of how important it is
to market your company.
It is incredibly important that you market your company’s services
in order to be successful in today’s highly competitive marketplace.
But how you market your business will be the determining factor in your
success.
In order to reach out to the most prospective customers, convert them into
existing and repeat customers and increase your revenue stream, your marketing
team should be employing many different types of marketing strategies.
These strategies should include both on-line and off-line advertising, as
well as a number of different advertising techniques. The online world is one of the
easiest and fastest ways to reach out to potential customers, so you should be
broadly marketing to them through their computers and mobile devices.
This means that you should be incorporating online marketing techniques
such as e-mail marketing, video marketing, search engine marketing and
social media marketing in order to reach the most amount of customers.
Social media marketing alone could vastly increase your customer base and
your brand’s recognition.

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If your business isn’t already using such online marketing tactics,
you could be missing out on the ability to directly advertise to hundreds,
thousands or even millions of potential customers.
Rest assured that your competitors are using online marketing techniques. If
you don’t want to fall behind it is highly recommended that you implement an
online marketing plan immediately.
This plan should include social media marketing strategies.

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W hat is Social Media Mar keting?
Social media has completely overtaken the online world in recent years.
Everyone and their brother are using social media to connect with others and
discover new and interesting things.
Social media marketing refers to the practice of advertising a
business through a number of social media websites.
This form of marketing allows a business to directly connect with their
existing customers and work towards developing new customers, all through a
medium that a large majority of people use every day.
It also lets you connect with your customers in a much more dynamic and
personalized manner.
Social media marketing strategies can be very large or very small,
depending on the company’s advertising objectives. The majority of social media
marketing occurs on major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
These are the online websites that a lot of people visit, use and depend on.
By using these mediums to directly connect with potential and existing
customers, businesses are keeping up with the same trends that their customers
are using. This is just one of the reasons why social media marketing campaigns
are so successful and popular.

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How Can Your Business Benefit
Fr om a Social Media Mar keting
Campaign?
Social media marketing strategies are quickly becoming the go-to
strategy for businesses that are looking to increase their web presence.
This is because this particular form of marketing can have a large number of
benefits for any business who uses it.
Here are some of the ways that your small business will benefit from
marketing through social media:
1. Social media marketing can help potential customers ‘discover’ your
business.

While most of your marketing strategies will be based on the concept of
directly talking to your customers, social media marketing goes a long way
towards the customer ‘discovering’ your company on their own.

Because social media sites promote communication and sharing between the
people who use it, it allows a user to share information about a product or
service they like with their friends.

It also allows a single user to locate or discover new things on their own,
based on how they navigate the various social media sites. This means a

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regular social media website user could accidentally find your
business while they are performing their everyday online tasks. This
can certainly add to your efforts to locate new customers.

2. Social media is wildly popular with online users.

One of the purposes of any business marketing campaign is to reach out to
as many potential customers as is possible. Social media websites are
extremely popular with online users, meaning your business will
have access to a very large number of people to advertise to.

Recent studies have indicated that Facebook has more than 1.06 billion
users and that more than 2.5 million websites have directly integrated
themselves with it. YouTube sees more than 1 billion unique users each
and every month, and Twitter has more than 1 billion users itself! More
than 525 million people are currently using Google Plus and that number
grows everyday as well.

This means that social media marketing offers your business the chance to
reach out to an awesome amount of people each and every day!

3. Social media marketing allows your business to raise its brand
awareness.

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Social media platforms allow a company to spread its brand’s
information all over the web. Potential viewers could end up seeing your
brand in image form, in online videos, in discussions between users and
via your company’s website.

They will also be able to hear about your brand when they perform an online
search. The more that people hear, read or see your brand, the better the
chance that it will stick in their minds.

This is how you can vastly increase your brand’s recognition factor. Social
media also allows your business to directly control its brand’s
reputation and repair any damage to it very quickly.

4. Social media marketing increases customer trust and loyalty.
One of the best ways to increase your customer’s trust in your company is to
speak to them directly, as though you were a friend rather than a business.
Social media allows your company to do exactly that. Direct interactions
and contact with customers that is engaging, interesting and cooperative both help to build up customer trust and create customer
loyalty.
Make your customers feel appreciated on a social media platform that they
use every day, and you will see an increase in repeat customer transactions!

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5. Social media allows you to create attention for your services and
products.

Anytime your business offers a new product or service you will want to bring
as much attention as possible to it. Social media marketing allows your
company to showcase your newest products or services all over the
web. It also lets you create a vast network of interested parties, through
which you can create this attention.

6. Social media allows you to check out what the competition is up to.

Anyone can check out any company or business that advertises via social
media. This means that you can easily check out the competition and find
out what they are up to.

Just make sure that your products, services, deals and promotions are
better than your competitors!

7. Social media allows you to interact with your customers.
With social media you can do more than just showcase your latest
advertisements to your customers. It lets you interact with them. Online
users are always bombarded by banners and advertisements, so they want
to see something different. Rather than just shoving an advertisement

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into their faces, you can use social media to deliver your message in
an engaging, interactive and far less aggressive manner.
You can have a talk with your customers and they can talk back. You can
use social media to find out your customer’s opinions, ideas and desires, and
then you can use the information to deliver it to them.
Direct interaction with your customer base can help your company in several
ways.
It can help you determine the effectiveness of your current
products and services, what types of changes your customers
would like to see, any current problems or concerns your
customers may have and what recommendations and suggestions
your customers are offering to you. You can also use it to
improve your customer relations, build customer trust and
develop loyalty.
All of this will end up helping your bottom line.
8. Social media is a great way to perform market research.
Speaking of interacting with your customers, social media marketing is a
great way to get a little market research done. Interactive online media
platforms allow you to listen to what your customers have to say
when it comes to products and services.
You will be able to hear what your customers say, read what they write and
track the specific web links they click on. You can then use this information to
improve your product or service- then you can use it to tell your customers
all about your improvements. Few things offer your business a chance for

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such easy insight into your specific market.
9. Social media can help you improve your customer service
department.

You already know how important quality customer service is to retaining
customer loyalty, so you are probably always looking for ways you can
improve it. The direct customer interactions offered through social
media sites are a great way to track and improve your customer
services.

You can directly ask for and receive questions and comments from your
customers, then you can directly respond to them. This kind of social media
customer service is less expensive than over-the-phone service, and
customers will appreciate the ability to connect with you via their favorite
form of interaction.

You can also respond to customer problems in real time, offering answers
and corrections almost immediately.

This means that you could turn a disgruntled customer back into a loyal
customer in a matter of seconds, in plain view of your other customers too!

10. Social media allows your business to establish itself as an expert in

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its niche.

It is very possible to establish your company as an expert in your
specific niche using the various tools created by social media
websites. All you have to do is contribute to some blogs, social media posts
or online videos and provide the viewer with some helpful information.

Not only will the viewer be learning something new about your business’s
niche, but they will also be associating your company and your brand as a
source of knowledge. People like to use businesses that they can trust.

11.Social media marketing allows you to build a network of loyal
followers.

Through the process of networking, you can develop a large following
of loyal customers. These loyal customers can then use the very same social
media processes to share their affection and loyalty for your company, adding
to your network. This means that your company could be networking to
thousands of people every minute of the day.

12.Social media is a very inexpensive form of business marketing.
Unlike other forms of traditional marketing, advertising along a
number of social media platforms is inexpensive. You do not have to

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cover the costs associated with creating and distributing promotional
advertisements, nor do you have to pay for paper, ink and shipping costs.
Almost all of the social media sites are free to join and maintain as well, so
you will only have to spend time and effort on your social media campaigns.
This form of online marketing is also very eco-friendly, because it does not
use physical paper advertisements.
13. Social media marketing can help with your SEO campaigns.

Your business should have a search engine optimization or SEO
campaign in effect, to make sure that your company’s website shows up at
the very top of the results of major search engines like Google and Bing.

Marketing through social media sites can increase your company’s
web visibility in the eyes of search engines, which will increase your
relevancy rankings.

You can also increase the amount of links connected to your website
through social media connections, YouTube videos, blog comments
and more. The more links the higher the relevancy rankings.

14.Social media marketing will drive traffic to your website.

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The more you are able to interact with your customers via social
media sites, the more likely it is they will visit your company’s
website. In-bound links and suggestions are great ways to help online
viewers locate your site.

15. Social media marketing is great for niche marketing.

If your company’s services and products are very niche specific,
social media marketing will allow you to market directly within your
niche. This can help you to reach that very specific field of customers who
will appreciate your individual product.

You can also help generate interest for your specific niche, which can help
you gain new customers and new followers. Social media marketing can be
both broad-based and specific niche-based at the same time, which gives
your business the best possible chance of reaching the most amounts of
customers.

16.Social marketing is already popular.

You won’t have to wait to begin drumming up interest in your social media
marketing campaign because social media is already outrageously popular.
Online viewers already know how to use these social sites and

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already expect to interact with businesses on them.
This means that your newly implemented social media marketing campaign
could begin producing results right off the bat!

As you can see, there are a large number of benefits associated with
social media marketing techniques.
These tactics already use a popular customer medium, and they increase
your business’s visibility, its reputation, its search engine ranking relevancy
and its ability to reach a large audience.
It is also very cheap, but extremely effective.

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How to Cr eate a Social Media
Mar keting Campaign
It is actually very easy to begin creating a social media marketing
strategy for your small business.
It will not cost a large amount of money to begin this process.
All you will need is time and effort to implement your tactics, and of course,
a plan. Before you begin creating a social media marketing plan for your business
you will want to create a list of objectives.
This list of objective should be relatively similar for all types of businesses,
and it could also include some niche-specific goals.
Here are some of the objectives you will want to determine before you get
your social media marketing plan going:
•

What do you want your company identity and reputation to look
like in the online world?

•

Which online users do you want to develop interactions with?
All users, some user or specific users?

•

What associations do you want for your business? These can be
peers, trade organizations, other groups, competitors,
companies in different niches, specific people, bloggers and
more.

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•

What message do you want to present to the online world?

•

How many social media mediums do you want to use?

The good news is that there is no specific way that you must use
social media for marketing purposes.
Any way that you can make your company more visible, promote customer
interactions and reflect positivley on your brand will be successful.
There are many different ways that you can use social media to market your
company, as long as you are consistent with your brand and your message. There
is no set in stone way to conduct a social media marketing campaign.
The next step in creating your business’s new social media
marketing campaign is to familiarize yourself with the most popular forms
of social media.
You will want to spread out your marketing campaign across numerous
media fronts, including both the most popular forms and some more niche-specific
outlets.
There are a few social media sites that you will absolutely want your
business to be marketing on. These sites include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter,
LinkedIn and Google Plus.
Here is a short rundown of the most popular social media sites.
Facebook
Facebook is one of the most highly used and widely recognized of

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the social media sites.
It has more than 1.06 billion users and more people are joining it every
day. It is very easy to create a Facebook account for your business.
The easiest way to get started is to go to Facebook’s homepage and click
on the ‘create an account’ icon.
You will want to make sure that your business’s Facebook name is
consistent with your other social media names and that your brand is always
portrayed in a consistent manner.
Once you have successfully created a Facebook account for your business
you can upload messages, videos, images, updates, RSS feeds and a host of
other features onto it.
Always keep your Facebook content fresh and new and try to offer
something of value to the viewer. Add status updates to encourage new viewers to
your page. Facebook also offers a number of tools that can be very helpful for a
business that is attempting to market itself.
Two examples of these are Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups.
Facebook Pages give you the ability to create an identity for your business
on Facebook.
The pages allow anyone to join your Facebook following and stay current
with everything your business is doing on the site. It will be your business’s profile
page as well, where the viewer can go to learn about your company and become a
fan.

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These ‘fans’ also have the ability to share your page with other users. The
goal is to create a buzz about your business and capture as many
Facebook fans as is possible. Anything that you add to your Facebook Page
will automatically be sent out to all of your fans through their mini-feeds.
To create a Facebook page you will have to fill out some basic
information about your company, some more detailed information and offer
some contact information.
You will also have to choose a category for your Page, which will
automatically be categorized with other similar pages by Facebook.
Make sure that you choose a good category for your Facebook Page, so
that the most online searchers will locate your page.
Facebook Groups are created when several users band together to
promote a similar idea.
Music bands and performers often have groups of Facebook users. You will
not be able to create a group based on your business or brand, but you can join
groups that share a similar interest to that of your business.
For example:
Say your business is active in charity work. You could join a
group devoted to a specific kind of charity. Being in a Facebook
Group will enhance your brand awareness and help you to gain new
followers.
The next step is to invite as many friends as possible to your new
business Facebook account.

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Try to get as many people as possible to “Like’ your page.
You can start by having your business’s employees, friends, family members
and anyone you can ask to begin ‘liking’ your page. Then you can use a number of
tactics to get your existing customers to ‘like’ your page.
You can reach out to your existing customers through your other marketing
tools, such as through your e-mail newsletters, your company website,
through in-store signs and even on your business cards. A lot of businesses will
offer their customers a special deal if they ‘Like’ the business on Facebook.
The goal is to create a large Facebook Fan following.
You will also want to integrate your Facebook account with a number of
other social media websites.
This will increase your search engine rankings and allow your viewers to
find your Facebook page from their Twitter accounts, from videos they watch
on YouTube and from all of the other social media sites they use.
To integrate your various other social media sites into your Facebook page,
go to the settings section of Facebook and find the ‘connect to accounts’ icon.
You will also want to embed Facebook’s “Like” button onto other places to
enhance your web presence.
You can have your website and blog viewers ‘like’ you on Facebook. The
embedded ‘Like’ feature is the thumbs-up white icon you have probably seen all
over the place.

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Facebook allows you to directly advertise to your customers using
targeted ads.
It also offers various tools for engaging your customers, including the
‘Promote my Page’ icon, its Sponsored Stories product, Facebook Deals and
a host of Facebook Apps.
Facebook offers its users an Insights page too. This is where you can view
the analytics for your specific account.
You will want to keep track of your Facebook page- how many people
joined your groups, how many people ‘Liked’ your business, who is contributing to
your wall or comments section and where your viewers came from.
This is vital to constantly updating and altering your social media
marketing plan to make it as successful as possible.
YouTube
YouTube is a social media website that allows people to share videos
with one another.
Almost anyone can post any kind of video they want to YouTube, as long as
it is within the website’s rules and regulations. More than 75% of the population
in the United States watches videos on YouTube, making it extremely popular
and very helpful for marketing purposes.
Hundreds of thousands of online viewers could potentially view your
marketing video on YouTube. The site’s users can also share and recommend

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your video to their friends, meaning that your own viewers could do a lot of your
networking for you.
Viewers can also rate your videos and leave comments about them. All of
this designed to encourage viewer participation and engagement, which can be
very beneficial for your company. YouTube also allows its users to create their
own YouTube channel page.
This can be a good tool for establishing and sharing a brand’s identity.
The first step to marketing your business through YouTube is to
create some kind of marketing video.
YouTube allows you to be creative and innovative with your marketing
techniques. It also allows you to market your business through video, which is a
much more dynamic and engaging way to spread your message.
There are many different types of marketing videos that you can create.
You can put together an informative or educational video to
teach something of value to your viewers. You can create ‘how-to’
videos regarding your products or services. You can make a video
that showcases your company through client or employee
testimonials. You can tell your viewers about your company’s
values and its charity work. You can simply create a funny video
that captures the attention of the audience, and then slip your
brand into it.
YouTube videos can be about anything, but they have to be valuable to the
viewer, or they will simply click on the next available video.

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The keys to producing quality YouTube videos are to keep the videos
short (less than 5mins), to make them engaging and to provide something
of value to the viewer.
This will be the most difficult part of your YouTube marketing strategy.
You will need to come up with a video that is unique, interesting and
informative about your company. It has to want to make the viewer come back
for more, and hopefully, make them remember your brand name.
A good marketing video should also encourage the viewer to visit your
business’s website or its storefront. It should display your company’s
consistent marketing message as well.
Once you have created a quality marketing video or set of videos,
the next step is to create a YouTube account.
Signing into YouTube requires a Google account but the process of
signing up is free.
This means that you will have to create a Google account specifically for
your business.
Be careful with using your personal Google accounts for business as
YouTube will automatically link your personal Google account to your YouTube
channel.
It is far better to create an account that is specifically for your business and
its marketing plan. You will have to visit Google’s Account Creation page to
create an account.

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It can be found at the top of Google’s home page, where there will be a
‘Create an Account’ icon or on YouTube’s home page. This Google account will
also be helpful for other parts of social media marketing campaign, especially
when you start marketing with Google Plus.
Create a username and password for your business as part of your account.
Make sure that you choose an e-mail account username that is not linked to
your personal accounts. Remember that your YouTube channel username
cannot be changed once it is created, so pick a good one. You will also have to
insert a birth date to prove to YouTube that you are older than 13 years.
If you pick the founding date of your business as a birthday and your
business is less than 13 years old, the account will be suspended. This suspension
cannot be undone.
Other things to avoid when choosing your business’s YouTube account
name are inappropriate language, anything that violates the trademark of another
company or a name that is too similar to another YouTube username.
The next step will be to customize your business’s YouTube channel.
Click on the account name in the upper right hand corner of the website.
Go to the menu and select ‘Channel’. From here you will be able to create a
username and a channel for your business.
Now you are ready to edit your business’s channel. Make sure to update the
channel’s title field, the profile image, the channel description field and
channel tag fields. These are important.
The channel’s title will automatically default as your username, so you

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may wish to alter it. Your channel name can be your business or brand’s name,
but it will be the first thing a viewer sees, so make it good. You will also want to
make sure that you add a URL link to your company’s website onto your
YouTube channel.
To do so click on the edit button in the ‘About Your Business’ section of the
channel page. You can also add your company’s logo to the channel and tags
that will make it easy for search engine users to land on your videos.
Once you have created your YouTube account you are ready to begin
uploading videos to it.
Uploading a video from a computer’s hard drive is very easy, and YouTube
provides clear instructions on how to do so. You can also embed your marketing
videos directly from YouTube onto your company’s website. This makes it very
easy to show videos on your website. Make sure that your marketing videos
uploaded onto YouTube remain public, so that they can be viewed by everyone.
YouTube offers you the ability to track your marketing videos
through Google Analytics.
With this tool you can see who is watching your videos, where they are
located, how they found your videos and whether or not they are recommending
your videos to others. This makes it easy for your marketing team to determine
how well your strategy is working and where it needs improvement.
You will also want to integrate your marketing videos on YouTube with a
number of other social media sites once you have them all set up. To integrate
your various social media sites with your YouTube videos you can use the
automatic sharing setting under YouTube’s Account settings.

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This is listed as the ‘Sharing tab’.

Integrating your YouTube videos with other social networks will
help increase your web presence, your social media website traffic and
your website’s relevancy in the eyes of search engines.
It is highly recommended.
You can also add to your marketing strategy on YouTube by signing up for
AdWords from Google.
Twitter
Twitter is a newer and interesting form of social media. Twitter allows its
users instant and quick communication, through short messages called
“Tweets”.
These messages are under 140 characters in length and are used to share
all kinds of information, from what the user had for breakfast to the release of a
new product. Twitter connects people through their mobile phones and through
the internet. Users can send out as many messages as they want per day and they
can choose to ‘follow’ or subscribe to another person’s Tweets, meaning each
time a tweet is sent out they will receive it.
Twitter also offers a search engine that lets its users search for certain
people or companies.
Although it may seem like a social tool, Twitter can also be used as a
business marketing tool.

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There are several ways that you can use this communication service to
generate buzz and connect with your customers. You can use it as a media
outlet, as a way to inform your customers about something new going on with
your company.
This has to be done in a certain way, because Twitter has short messages
and a code of ethics. You can also insert links to your website, YouTube video
or anything else into your Twitter updates.
Another good way to use Twitter as a marketing tool is to encourage
your customers to become ‘followers’, and then periodically offer them
Tweets with promotions and deals in them.
Just be careful about sending out Tweets that are plain advertisementsusers don’t like that.
Like YouTube, Twitter marketing requires a little style and content that is
unique. It is great place to give your company and your brand some personality
and a unique voice. It is also an exceptional way to directly interact with your
customers.
You can use Twitter to find out what your customers think, why they think
this way and you can directly tell them what your company is doing to make it
better for them. It can be a very helpful customer service tool.
Setting up a Twitter account is quick, easy and free.
It can be accomplished on Twitter’s homepage, by creating a Twitter
account and profile page. Once you have a business account you can search for
people to follow, invite other people to follow you via e-mail and create links to
your blog or website.

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Embedding the Tweeting button onto your website and blog and connecting
your Twitter account to your Facebook account makes it easy for your users to
follow your company’s message, and it helps generate more links for SEO
purposes.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the web’s largest professional social network.
It has more than 200 million members.
LinkedIn allows people to directly connect with one another for businessrelated reasons. The idea is to allow people to share ideas, knowledge and
professional opportunities with other people from all over the web.
It features a variety of tools that can be useful for business and it lets a
business create a professional profile. These profiles are often one of the first
results to be listed on search engines, which can be very helpful for controlling
your business’s reputation. LinkedIn also helps businesses keep in touch with
clients and friends, find experts in specific business areas, and locate new business
opportunities.
It can be a very helpful tool for lead generation as well.
LinkedIn can also be used as part of your small business’s marketing
plan.
Like many of the forms of social media, LinkedIn is free to join and easy to
update.
It also allows you to link to your other forms of social media, which is a

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helpful part of your SEO strategy.
The goal of this social medium is to make as many business-related
connections as possible.
LinkedIn allows you to add a personal touch to your business through your
connections and your profile. It also lets a business create followers with tools like
Groups. It also features its own analytical tools so that you can determine who
is following your business. The Polls feature is a great way to do market research
too.
There are many different ways that businesses can use LinkedIn to market
themselves.
Businesses can directly ask customers questions to find out what
it is they want in their products and services. You can also use
this online forum to publish all of your print-based marketing
materials, like business cards, newsletters and brochures, in
order to increase customer knowledge about your company.
LinkedIn helps you grow your business network by adding other
business-related contacts, not just prospective and existing customers.
One of the most useful aspects of this social media service is that you can
use it to build up your company’s credibility. Not only can you add to your market
research knowledge through it, but you can also gain recommendations from other
businesses, get referrals from happy customers, directly respond to your
customers via the inbox and develop contacts with experts in your business’s
niche.
Google Plus

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Goggle Plus is a newer version of the search engine, with a complete social
network added in. Essentially, it is an amalgamation of many of the most
popular social services.
It can be found to the left of Google’s top bar, under the icon labeled
‘You+’. If you have already created a Google account for your YouTube page,
then you will already have a Google Plus account.
Google Plus has many new social features; including automated photo
uploads onto your mobile phone for instant sharing, a group message mobile
phone app known as Huddles, online video chat services called Hangouts
and the ability to have internet content that you are interested automatically
brought to you from Sparks.
Members can also join Circles, which allow them to connect with people
with interests that are similar to theirs. The Stream feature allows the people
within these Circles and larger Circles known as Extended Circles to receive
instant updates on specific subjects.
All of these features are designed to improve upon the current social
networking medium.
Google Plus has significantly altered the social media landscape.
It provides a whole new way to network with other people through the web.
It can also be a very valuable marketing tool for a small business.
You can use these new features to reach out to customers in a completely
different way.
For example:

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You can break down your clients into Circles, based on the
product or service they are most likely to want to hear about.
This is a very useful form of targeted marketing, where the
customer will only receive promotions, news and updates on
things they are interested in. The same can be said of the
Stream feature, as it lets you send out updates and information
about a product or service to a specific group of people. In
turn, the people within these Circles can then share this useful
information with others.
The goal is to create an almost unending chain of sharable
information.
The instant uploading of photos from any mobile device is a quick and easy
way to share photos relating to your business.
A good marketing example of this service would be sharing instant photos
of your newest product launch or special event with your interested parties,
without having to wait to upload them on a computer.
This process allows a business to share and interact with its customers
online in ‘real time’. The Sparks tool can be especially helpful for marketing
purposes. It allows the user to automatically receive text, content, videos, photos
and other things based on their pre-defined interests. This allows a marketer to
selectively advertise to very interested parties.
You can also use the instant video calls of Huddles to improve your
customer service ‘face time’.
Google Plus even offers a sharable button, very similar to the “Like” button
of Facebook. If an online user likes some of your content and wants to share it

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with their friends, all they have to do is to click on the “+1” icon. This can be used
as a ‘word of mouth’ stamp of approval and can help generate interest and buzz
about your brand.
This “+1” stamp also increases your relevancy and credibility with the
search engines, which will increase your rankings.
As a marketer, you can use Google Plus to directly engage and interact
with your customers, both in a one-on-one and in a group fashion, generate buzz
about your brand, spy on what the competition is doing and find out exactly what
your customers are looking for in your product or service.
There are a few things you can do to make sure you are using Google Plus
as effectively as possible.
First, take the time to create a great Google Plus profile,
which includes your business’s information. Next, you will want
to add as many relevant people to your profile as possible. This
includes all of your Facebook friends. Use the Stream feature to
spread the word about your products and services, just don’t
overdo it and spam people to death. Use photos and videos as
much as you can, and tag as many people as you can.

One of the most important aspects of your Google Plus marketing
strategy will be to ask for “+1” votes.
These will actually represent one vote of approval from your customers and
will increase your search engine ranking.
Plus, online users associate this vote as a nod of approval from other users,

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which will make them much more likely to be interested in your company.
Overall, Google Plus has the ability to change your entire online marketing
game. If you can integrate your marketing plan into this new form of social media,
you will vastly expand your marketing reach.

Other social media sites
Your small business’s marketing plan should definitely incorporate
the major social media sites into it, because these are the sites that will
grant you the broadest possible audience.
These are also the social media sites that the vast majority of people use.
However, one of the most valuable aspects of social media marketing as
whole is that it allows a business to reach out to potential customers on both a
broad base level and on a more specific level.
This means that your marketing strategy should use both broad-based
social mediums and more niche-specific ones at the same time. There are a
number of smaller, more niche-specific social media websites that you can use.
Here are a few of the more well-known of the smaller sites, but you will also
want to do a little research in order to find ones that are extremely specific to your
business’s niche.
Blogger- this is a blog publishing service owned by Google. It allows both private
and multi-user blogs to be published in real time. Registration is free.

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Orkut- this is another Google-owned social networking site. It allows people find
both new and old friends, and is most popular in India and Brazil. It offers 48
different language choices.
Delicious- this social media website is a service for locating, discovering, storing
and sharing web bookmarks.
Exploroo- this is a travel-related social network.
Fotolog- this website is a Web 2.0 photo-blog sharing site. It is one of the web’s
oldest sharing sites for photos, photo diaries and photo-blogs.
MySpace- this social media was once very popular until it was overtaken by
Facebook. It offers very similar social media opportunities.
Tumblr- this is a social media blogging platform that allows its users to post
content and multimedia in short-form blogs.
Digg- this is social news website, which offers story sharing submission and
widespread voting services. Members can choose to either ‘dig’ a story or ‘bury’ it,
depending on whether or not they like it.
Pinterest-this is a unique social media website that allows its users to organize
anything they find on the web. Then they can share their interests with others.
Groupsite- this is a collaboration website for groups of people. It is very helpful
for local professionals who are involved with the same industry. It has both free
and paid membership features.
PartnerUp- this is an online community that focuses on the needs of small
business entrepreneurs and owners. It can be very helpful for locating useful

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business contacts and is free to join.

Social Media Mar keting Best

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Pr actices
•

Don’t overdo it when sharing your business-related information
through social media networks. The goal is create a more personalized
connection between your business and its customers- not to overwhelm
them with promotional ads and commercials.

•

Always follow the rules and regulations for each social media site.
Ignoring these rules and regulations could end up getting your business’s
account terminated.

•

Create a social media marketing plan, but adjust your specific tactics
as you go. Be flexible and take the time to find out what works and what
doesn’t work.

•

Always be transparent with your intentions. Don’t lie to your
customers or hide the fact that you are advertising to them.

•

Commit the time and effort to maintain your social media marketing
plan. While this form of marketing is relatively inexpensive, it does require
time and effort to keep all of your social media content fresh and up-to-date.
You will want to constantly update and re-fresh your content across all of
your social media.

•

Don’t intrude on people’s private space. It is one thing to use social
media to interact with your customers- it is another to invade their personal
online space and banter them.

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•

Always participate. In the world of social media marketing, you have to
give to receive. Be sure to participate in your social media networks and to
give something of use. This will ensure that you get back, usually in the form
of increased revenue.

•

Pay attention to social media ethics, and whatever you do- don’t
become a spammer!

•

Support the promotional campaigns of other non-competitive
businesses on your social media sites in exchange for their support.

•

Always use your social media marketing campaigns to promote
goodwill and respect, rather than using as a form of negative
advertising.

•

Be prepared to deal with how online users change, alter or use your
brand’s message. Have a plan for both good and bad customer feedback.

•

Pay attention to the metrics and analytics of your campaign.

•

Listen to your customers through your social media marketing
strategies. Then respond accordingly.

•

Pay attention to trends. Trends are something that appear, disappear and
then reappear often in the world of social networking. Keep in touch with the
times and alter your campaign to match the most recent trends.

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Conclusion
Social media marketing has a large number of positive benefits for
small businesses.
You can use these marketing methods to get your company name known
and to increase its reputation in the eyes of your customers.
A perfect social media marketing campaign would result in almost everyone
who uses Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google knowing your business’s
name.
The more you can get your business’s identity shared, processed and talked
about, the more people will end up visiting your websites and stores. This will
undoubtedly result in increased revenues. How you go about generating this
interest will depend on your business’s specific marketing goals and strategy.
Social media marketing is also inexpensive, although it requires a

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good amount of time and effort.
The rewards of this form of marketing far outweigh the amount of time and
effort you have to put into it however.
So if your business isn’t already spreading its brand and message through
the world of social media, you are missing out on almost unlimited leads and
potential customers.
It is never too late to begin marketing your company through social media!

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